"Yeah? What was it?"
"When science progressed enough to analyze it, it was found to be the bodies of millions of dead bugs."
"Terrific." Jacky stood up and straightened his necktie. "I'm inspired to walk back to the hotel and kill mosquitoes. Let me know if you turn up anything resultful."
After Jacky moped off, Muldoon painted in some of his past for me. Raised by parents both ecclesiastical and into the Edgar Cayce readings, Muldoon had grown up pretty blase concerning theories arcane. Enoch of Ohio was his first real turn-on.
"He came to town and set up his tent. During the day he did horoscopes and tattoos, then at night he'd have these meetings. He'd go into a trance and answer questions, as 'Rey-Torl.' Rey-Torl used to be a cobbler in Mu, made Mu shoes, then his business went under so he moved on to Atlantis and became an unlicensed genetic surgeon. He eventually got run out of town and ended up in Egypt, helping Ra-ta build the pyramid."
"Sounds hot. Did Rey tell you any good dirt?"
"Not really. The same thing that Cayce and all the other prophecy brokers say: that the Piscean Age is flopping toward the end of its two-thousand-year run and the Grand Finale is coming up soon, and that it's going to happen in this last quarter of this century. Rey-Torl called it Apodosis. Enoch called it the Shit Storm."
"The last quarter?"
"Give or take a couple of decades. But soon. That's why the Cayce people place so much importance on locating that secret hall. It's supposed to contain records of previous shit storms plus some helpful hints on how to survive them. However --"
I had the feeling this wasn't the sort of stuff Muldoon talked about with fellow Egyptology students at the university.
"- everything has to be exactly right before you can find it: you, the time, the position of the earth, that damned Cat's Paw."
Looking off toward the black lump of the Sphinx's head he quoted by heart the most famous of the Cayce predictions:
" 'This in position lies, as the sun rises from the waters, the line of the shadow (or light) falls between the paws of the Sphinx, that was later set as the sentinel or guard, which may not be entered from the connecting chambers from the Sphinx's paw (right paw) until the time has been fulfilled when the changes must be active in this sphere of man's experience. Between, then, the Sphinx and the river.
It was the same prophecy that had drawn me to the pyramid by way of Virginia Beach. Everybody at the Cayce library was familiar with it. Whenever I mentioned that I was on my way to Egypt the usual response from blue-haired old ladies and long-haired ex-hippies alike was, "Gonna look for the Hall of Records, huh?"
"And the Sphinx isn't the only guard," Muldoon went on. "The readings mentioned whole squadrons of 'sentries' or 'keepers' or 'watchmen' picketed around the hidden hall. All around here, actually. This whole plateau is a geodetic phenomenon protected by a corps of special spooks."
I shivered from the wind. Muldoon stood up. "I've got to head back to Cairo if I'm going to make my eight o'clock tomorrow." He snapped his Levi's jacket closed, still looking off at the Sphinx. "A woman from the A.R.E. did come over and try, you know? After a lot of rigamarole and red tape they actually let her drill a hole in the front of the right paw…"
"Did she find anything?"
"Nothing. How she chose that one spot out of the mile or so between the paw and the river she never disclosed, but it was solid rock as far down as she drilled. She was very disappointed."
"What about those ghostly guards, did they smite her?"
"That was not disclosed either. She did, however, end up marrying the Czechoslovakian ambassador."
Hands in his pockets, Muldoon headed off into the shadows, saying he'd see me "bukra fi'l mish-mish." It was a phrase you hear a lot in Cairo. "It's the Arabic version of mañana," I remembered Jacky had said, "only less definite. It means Tomorrow, when it's the season of the apricot.' "
Left alone, I tried to recall what I knew about geodetic phenomena. I remembered my trip to Stonehenge, watching the winter solstice sun rise up the slot between those two rocks directly in front of me, knowing that exactly half a year later it would slide up between those other two rocks exactly to my right, and how the phenomenon forced you to strain your concept of where you are to include the tilt of our axis, the swing of our orbit around the sun, the singular position on our globe of this circle of prehistoric rocks – how it made you appreciate being in the only place on earth where those two solstice suns would rise thus.
I know that the pyramid was built in such a place – one of the acupuncture points of the physical planet – but no matter how I tried I couldn't get that planetary orientation that Stonehenge gives you.
For one thing I was still disoriented by that feeling of dimensions dropping away – everything still seemed flat, even the back of the Sphinx's head – and for another, I couldn't quite convince myself that I was alone. There seemed to be someone still close, and coming closer! The two hundred Egyptian pound notes in my pocket were suddenly bleeping like a beacon and I was beginning to glance about for a weapon when, down the hill, the Sphinx's whole head lit up and proclaimed in a voice like Orson Welles to the tenth power:
"I… am… the… Sphinx. I am… very old."
It boomed this out over the accompanying strains of Verdi's Aida, as Chephren lit up a glorious green, and little Mykerinos glowed blue, and the Great Pyramid blazed an appropriate gold. It was the Sound and Light show, put on for the benefit of an outdoor audience at the bottom of the hill. From the tombs and mastabas everywhere banks of concealed floodlights illuminated the pyramids in slowly shifting hues while the Sphinx ran it all down in grandly amplified English. I just happened to hit it English night. The other performances rotate through French, German, Russian, and Arabic.
In this golden glow I suddenly saw the little figure I had sensed, hunkered on a limestone block about thirty yards away, watching me. Taking advantage of the light, I got up and headed immediately back around the Great Pyramid in long strides. I didn't turn until I had reached the road. He was right behind me.
"Good evening, my friend. A very nice evening, yes?" He hurried the last few steps to fall in beside me. He wore a blue gellabia and scuffed black oxfords without socks. "My name is Marag."
I came to know that it was spelled that way but it was pronounced with a soft "g" so it rhymed with collage, only with the accent on the first syllable: Mah-razhhh.
"Excuse me but I hear you wish to buy some hashish? Five pounds, this much."
He made a little circle with his thumb and finger and smiled through it. His face was polished teak, alert and angled, with a neat black mustache over tiny white teeth. His eyes flashed from their webwork of amused wrinkles. An old amusement. I judged him to be at least forty, as easily seventy, and not quite as tall as my thirteen-year-old son. Hurrying along beside me he seemed to barely touch the ground. When at last I relinquished the five-pound note and shook his hand to seal our deal, his fingers sifted through my grip like so much sand.